Joost Bosland sent me this pic of Penny Siopis’ name up in lights at the Prince Charles Cinema in London’s Leicester Square. As part of the events around mega art fair Frieze, where the Stevenson Gallery was showing for the first time, Penny was invited to screen her four short films, made between 1997 and 2012. The programme was entitled ‘This is a True Story’.
Video still from Penny Siopis’ ‘The Master is Drowning’ 2012
For her films, Penny combines documentary footage with found home movie inserts, often sourced from charity shops, to create a strange crossover between historical fact, like the attempted assassination of Nationalist prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd, and the random. Old film footage has a very particular quality, a colour range which cannot really be reproduced with contemporary materials, which locate her films firmly in the past. At the same time, the disjuncture between the narrative and the images on the screen gives them an almost hallucinatory, dreamlike quality which relates to the fragmentary and imperfect nature of memory.
A performance by Pedro Gomez-Egena’s paper dinosaur at Blank Projects
‘Machine Worries, Machine Hearts’ was the title of a group show curated by Anthea Buys which took the ambivalent relationship between humans and machines as a theme. One evening this week, an appreciative crowd witnessed a paper dinosaur make the slow descent from a high, threatening stance to a grovel on the floor.
The artist was South American Pedro Gomez-Egena, and his koki and cut paper dinosaur controlled by wires and weights showed that successful large scale kinetic sculptures can be made from the simplest materials.
Johannesburg style captured by blogger Scott Schuman on The Sartorialist
As many of you probably already know, fashion photographer Scott Schumann is one of the most indefatigable bloggers around, often updating his site www.thesartorialist.com more than once a day with great street style shots from around the world.
Late this week, some images appeared datelined Downtown Johannesburg, including the one above. The comments column carried responses both from Joburgers swooning that Scott had actually arrived in Jozi, and the usual comments directed at the clothes and the style of the person in the pic.
Predictably, a few people said they thought the woman in the background more interesting than the man. I liked this response from Camille Reddress:
Funny how lots of people want to see ‘the woman in the background’. They see an African woman in a headwrap and a burden on her head and see it as more ‘exotic’ or ‘authentic’. Interesting. That is why I love your shots Scott because you photograph what you see not what is perceived to be ‘typical’ of a place or people.
Yep, this S.A man loves his camel coat and he looks amazing in it.
Atish Jogi then commented:
The shoes are old golf shoes, it is likely that this man has worked as or is currently working as a caddy at one of the many golf courses in Johannesburg. Great Shot! Welcome to South Africa!
This know-it-all response received a come-uppance from Energie who wrote:
I’m sorry, but you have absolutely no way of being able to make that assumption – he could have bought the shoes, or assuming they are golf shoes, he could be a golf player. You have no way of assuming that he is/was a caddy.
In South Africa, even comments on fashion blogs reflect attitudes towards race and gender.
